Starbuck and The Bachelor

Recently, I experienced one of those moments of serendipity where the contrast of two cultural events leads to some surprising insights. Within a few days of each other, I saw the final episode of The Bachelor, followed by the French Canadian film Starbuck. The Bachelor tracked, in its most recent season, a man choosing from 25 women to be his bride, or as he liked to put it as many times as possible, “the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.” Starbuck is a fiction film about a 42-year-old man who discovers that he has fathered over 500 children through a sperm bank.
The obvious similarity between Starbuck and The Bachelor is that both stories focus on the male role in the mating dance. But what we should study as writers is how each works through a particular genre to make its case. Starbuck uses one of the eight sub-genres of comedy, the traveling angel story (for the story beats of Traveling Angel and the other 7 major forms, see the Comedy Class). The Bachelor relies on the love story and one of the major forms of television, the reality show. 
Starbuck appears to be just another example of the low comedy, also known as gross out comedy, that has taken over Hollywood for at least a decade.

After all, the entire movie is based on the comic contrast of a vast number of human beings resulting from one man’s seed. But that would be a serious misreading of the film. The high concept premise is just the setup for the overall comic story structure – the traveling angel form – that is the real secret to the film’s success. 
Of the eight major comic sub-genres, the traveling angel comedy is the only form I have never seen fail at the box office. I recently did a structure breakdown of Intouchables, a very successful traveling angel film from France. Other examples include Amelie, Chocolat, and Mary Poppins. 
Starbuck twists the traveling angel form in that the hero doesn’t enter a community in trouble. The writers establish him up front as a total screwup who has gotten his girlfriend pregnant and clearly is in no position to be a true father. He then discovers he has biologically fathered over 500 children, and 142 of them are suing to find out his identity. 
Now the traveling angel element kicks in. The hero clandestinely meets a number of his offspring, all of whom have problems. And this man who is incapable of being a father in his own life tries to help, and care for, the children he created in a test tube twenty years before. 
Notice this is comedy of contrast and structure, not comedy of dialogue. Comedy based primarily on funny dialogue doesn’t travel well, because it’s based on language and cultural references unique to a particular country or region. Comedy based on big structural contrasts is the only type of comedy that works for a worldwide audience, because the laughs come from character and action. (Sure enough, remake rights to the film have been sold in France and India, and a Hollywood version, called “The Delivery Man,” starring Vince Vaughn, is coming out in October.) 
By hanging the jokes on the traveling angel story structure, Starbuck can move from the low base of animal humor to the heights of community and true fatherhood. Instead of packing as many petty jokes and gags as the writers can fit into 109 minutes, the script has a foundation of heart and character change that makes the humor icing on a very tasty cake. 
Starbuck uses comedy to strip the man’s role in the mating game down to its lowest biological denominator, then builds to love. The Bachelor uses the love story to dress up the man’s role with romance, but the reality show competition makes it really about the biological survival of the fittest. 
Again, to understand how The Bachelor story actually works, you have to look at how the genre plays through the medium, in this case the love story through reality television. Of course, reality shows are not “real,” they are written, in that producers create conflict situations for the contestants to resolve. Which is why they should be called “surreality” shows, because they take real people and put them in a highly constructed and dramatic world. 
The Bachelor, like many reality shows, is designed to produce as much conflict and humiliation as possible. This is one reason why The Bachelor is a more dramatic – and sadistic – show than The Bachelorette, because when the women are sent home they almost invariably cry. Rejection and humiliation in love in front of a national audience, what could be better than that? 
There is another medium besides television The Bachelor love story plays through, and that is the game. The Bachelor is a tournament of love. When love is turned into a game, emotions are forced into bite-sized slots. The participants know it’s a game played for an audience, but they can’t help feeling the emotion. Of course, this is fast food emotion, freeze dried emotion. When the game is over and the cameras shut down, the two winners find out that love in the every day is a very different animal. 
Part of the severe contrast of love and game comes from the compressed time of the love story. The couple on a date never gets a chance to experience one another, because they are so conscious they are on a filmed date, and they are dating on deadline. So they are always meta-dating, talking about how well the date is going, about how right they are for each other, even though they’ve barely said word one. 
Probably the central problem contestants have on the show is reconciling these dual and conflicting requirements of love and game. They want true love but they are also competing to win the game. Indeed, the worst thing one player can say about another is “she’s here for the wrong reasons” – ie, to win this game, or win the larger game of becoming a reality TV star, which means she doesn’t really care about love. 
But this conflict between love and game is ultimately false. Far from being a highly unrealistic love story played out in compressed time in front of cameras and a national audience, The Bachelor, and even more so The Bachelorette, mimic what is really happening in the mating game. In real life men compete to see whose seed gets to impregnate the highly prized egg. Women compete to see whose egg gets to benefit from the male with the best resources. Love is the feeling human parents create to try to extend a single moment of mating to the years it takes to successfully raise a child. 
Like any reality show, especially one based on competition, The Bachelor has certain story beats that the producers (read writers) create. You know they’re coming, but the women fall for them anyway. I love to count the story tricks the producers come up with while they are actually happening. 
And the women’s responses to these story beats are totally predictable, at every stage of the plot, all the way down to repeating the same lines of dialogue. The show appears to be about romance, and the game is all about choosing a life partner, about free will of the heart. But these real people, who are not reading from a script, are mouthing the same lines and experiencing the same jealousy and heartache. They are programmed to do and say this stuff. 
The producers don’t have to write the lines down in a script. All they have to do is create the competitive, survival-of-the-fittest situation, with at least one death each week, and the women are guaranteed to say the lines anyway. 
This pre-programmed, mating game quality is even more apparent on The Bachelor than on The Bachelorette. On The Bachelor I can often tell who the guy is going to pick by how he looks at a woman when she gets out of the limo the first night. It’s remarkably obvious, at least for the final 2 or 3. That’s men. And while it gives The Bachelor a slight detective quality - as I try to figure out if I’m right about who killed the bachelor with a lightning bolt – it also makes the entire season one long stall. When a woman is choosing from 25 men, it’s not so easy. A woman needs to hear what the guy has to say, even if he’s only saying a pre- programmed line just a little bit better than the next guy.

Success as a popular storyteller in the worldwide markets of film and television comes down to how you play out your genre in your medium. Doing something unique is never easy. But if you know your forms well enough to twit them, you can come up with something that will stand out from the crowd.

Girls

The same night it won the Golden Globes for Best Sitcom, Girls premiered the first episode of its second season on HBO. That episode perfectly encapsulated the strengths of this unique television comedy, but also the costs.

The biggest strength of Girls is that it purposely breaks the sitcom form. Transcending the genre is one of the main strategies in present-day screenwriting. It is also a great strategy for sitcoms, because you can give the audience the pleasures of the form while also standing out from the crowd.

TV is all about the characters we return to every week. So to see how Girls really works, and how it transcends the sitcom form, we have to begin by looking at the character web of the show. Girls sets up the character web using the technique I call “4-point opposition” (see the Sitcom Audio Class for details), which is the structural foundation of the classic sitcom. With 4-point opposition, you have a minimum of four central characters, each distinctly different from the others. All stories and comedy come from the various interactions of these four characters.

Where Girls twists the normal 4-point opposition is in how it differentiates the characters, and most especially in how it defines their character flaws. Traditional sitcom characters have one trait by which they can quickly be labeled comically, such as the innocent, or the raunchy one. They also have one weakness, which is relatively mild and almost always strictly psychological. A popular sitcom like 2 Broke Girls isn’t about exploring complex characters. It’s about placing two characters with an easily recognized comic shtick in some kind of trouble every week and watching the unique way they get out.

Even a transcendent sitcom like Sex and the City, on which much of Girls is modeled, used a fairly simplistic 4-point opposition and character definition. Miranda was the smart professional, Samantha the sex kitten, Charlotte the pretty innocent. Only Carrie was a complete, complex character, and even she had no moral flaws, with the possible exception of her addiction to shoes (just think how many starving people all that money could have fed).

In contrast, the four main women on Girls have serious character flaws, both psychological and moral. These women are very self-centered, they make lots of mistakes, and they sleep with the wrong people. Sex for these women is very in-your-face, and often painfully pathetic.

The most obvious benefit to a more complex character definition/opposition is that it gives the audience a strong sense that this is probably what women in their early 20s are really doing. That’s followed immediately by the sense that we haven’t seen anywhere close to this kind of reality before. Sure I’ve always known intellectually that the traditional singles sitcom is a fantasy confection. But one episode of watching Girls made it jarringly obvious to me that all other depictions of young women in sitcoms have been simplistic fakes.

This greater “reality” does have its costs. The lead character of Hannah, played by the creator-writer-director of the show, Lena Dunham, seems to have an inordinate desire to shove her naked body in our faces. I for one feel that a little of that goes a long way. In fact, it has already gone way too far. I get that this is a stockier woman who is saying, “I have every right to be proud and honest about my body and my sexuality too.” And she’s more comfortable exposing her body than the classically beautiful Marnie is in showing hers. But it’s just not pleasant. Lena, darling, trust me. Tone it waaaay down.

Notice Hannah’s approach to sex is in sharp contrast to the lead character in Sex and the City. In the entire history of that show, Carrie never had a sex scene where she wasn’t wearing a bra, the whole time! I realize this may have been written into the actress’s contract. But the effect was still a 20s-30s woman, very forward in her thinking, who was extremely embarrassed about her body. To the point of making us doubt that the show was ever about sex and the city.

Another way that Girls structurally flips the normal sitcom form is in the way it handles the characters’ self-revelations, in other words, what they learn from their trials and tribulations. The normal sitcom character has few if any self-revelations. The conventional wisdom has always been: we can’t have the characters undergo any real change or growth, because that would destroy the setup and chemistry of the show.

These girls, especially Hannah, have self-revelations all the time. But their insights have the life of a flea. These girls are constantly analyzing themselves, as if they can make themselves grow up and have happy lives just by thinking about it. They make mistakes and are immediately aware of those mistakes, so they have this strange mix of being highly intelligent and clueless at the same time. Often the contrast is so extreme that it stretches credulity.

But it’s also a big advantage, because this mix not only defines their characters, it is the source of much of the comedy on the show. Notice the constant alternation between self-revelations and blunders is built into the characters from the beginning, in the way the show was originally constructed. And the original construction of a show determines everything that is possible as the show plays out its run.

In this vein, it’s instructive that the name of the show is Girls, not Women. That not only tells you the maturity level of these characters, it is a very conscious reference to the classic feminist line: “We are women, not girls.” These women are well past the feminist struggle of who they can be in a male-dominated society. They don’t even think about it. But they are still girls in how much they screw things up. They have little clue of how to be a woman.

A show with this kind of set-up gives the writers tremendous freedom to explore character and break out of the sitcom straightjacket. But it also creates some serious problems.

For one thing, these women can be deeply annoying. I actually prefer “unlikable” characters. Seinfeld showed us long ago that unlikable characters are more intriguing, especially over the long haul of a series, and are much funnier. But these women are so self-centered no one could stand to be with them for longer than 10 minutes.

But there’s a bigger problem that comes with such complex, self-aware characters: thin plot. The reason it’s called situation comedy is you put the heroes in a predicament and watch them struggle to get free. This predicament structure gives you maximum plot, not just for one episode but for a hundred episodes over many seasons.

In contrast, the girls in Girls are so self-conscious, navel gazing to the point of stupidity, that they don’t tell much of a story. They don’t do anything. For this show to not only last but also to grow, the writers have to create comedy from the contradictions of the characters and from the surprises of the plot.

The people who like this show may not care for “more” plot. They and the show’s creator might argue that they are not interested in the big, predicament plots of most sitcoms. These are plots of living everyday, of becoming adult women with the help, and sometimes the hindrance, of your best friends. And that feels real and satisfying.

But I’m not arguing for that kind of traditional sitcom plot. I think the future path for this show, which the writers have already begun to explore, lies in the moral flaws of the characters. One of the best scenes of last season was a blowout argument between Hannah and Marnie over who was more selfish and who was the better friend.

If the writers can find the right blend between psychological flaws and moral dilemmas, so surprising plot comes from complex characters, this show will be winning awards for a long time to come.

2012 Scripts Nominated for Oscars

Here are some of my thoughts on this year’s Best Screenplay Oscar nominees. I’d love to hear your thoughts too. So please add your comments at the end of the article and let’s get a great discussion going. Adapted Silver Linings Playbook All stories concerning mental illness require some kind of cheat. If the hero is truly mentally ill, he is compelled to act a certain way. Hopefully his doctor can find a drug that can control it, because with a lot of mental illness we are not in the realm of choice and will power. But that’s not dramatic, and it’s not funny. If you can’t accept this cheat you may have trouble enjoying Silver Linings Playbook. The lead character, Pat, clearly has a mental illness at the beginning of the story. But through the love of a good (but also troubled) woman, he not only overcomes his illness, he matures at the end. Putting aside the reality of this change, the way Pat gets there is beautifully written, and is one of my two favorites for winning Best Adaptation.

Silver Linings Playbook is a rare example of a transcendent romantic comedy. Yes, it hits all the story beats of this highly choreographed form, as it must. But what really sets it apart is that it also twists every beat in a unique way. This allows Silver Linings Playbook to overcome the predictability of the romantic comedy form, an almost impossible feat for a writer to accomplish in this day and age. I also have to mention the wonderful scene work and dialogue in this film. The scene where Tiffany makes the case to Pat’s father that she is in fact good luck for all of them is an instant classic, and worth careful study for anyone trying to master the screenwriter’s craft. Argo My other favorite for wining Best Adaptation is Argo. I’ve written a review of this film already. But let me say here that writer Chris Terrio has pulled off the difficult task of combining the True Story genre with Thriller and Action to produce a real knockout punch of a film. Let me be clear. The craft in this script does not come from transcending the main genre. As a couple of readers of my in-depth review accurately pointed out, the hero has no moral flaw and only the barest psychological weakness. Because of this unique story, I don’t believe that the lack of a serous character weakness is a big story problem inArgo. But it does keep the film from hitting the pinnacle of artistic success. So where does the quality of this script come from, if not from transcending the form? It comes from the seamless way Argo combines genres that don’t normally go together. And it is a classic example of the screenwriter’s craft, of using the power of the cut in cinema to create an inexorable vortex hurtling the viewer forward at a faster and faster rate. This script is a crowd pleaser in the best sense of that term, and that feat should not be underestimated. Life of Pi I came to the film, Life of Pi, having already read the book, and though I liked it I was not a big fan. I loved the basic premise of the boy and the tiger together on a lifeboat, and found many of the incidents enjoyable. But the overall story for me was flat and episodic. Also, it did not make its thematic case for a God, in whatever form one wants to believe, nor did it make the case for the healing power of storytelling itself (something I fervently believe). Given that, I was impressed that the screenwriter, David Magee, did as well as he did in translating this Personal Myth-Fantasy Memoir to the screen. Unfortunately, what I saw as the flaws in the original book remain. And I think Magee made a serious mistake in the way he handled the storyteller frame. In my Masterpiece class, I talk extensively about this powerful but difficult story tool. In Life of Pi, the storyteller frame does not lead to a new dramatic conclusion, and the constant return to the storyteller throughout the film makes the story seem even more episodic than it already is. Lincoln I’ve said in my more in-depth review that I believe Lincoln will win Best Adaptation, but I will be sad if it does. This film is rife with Oscar Disease, wherein the patient is horribly bloated, boring and believes he is doing God’s work among the Great Unlearned. Starting with the laughably phony and absurd opening scene, every scene in this film is at least twice as long as it should be. Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg, if you are going to make me take my medicine for 2 1/2 hours, at least wrap it up in some sugar (that is, plot, artistic craft and subtle, non-preachy dialogue). Original Moonrise Kingdom While I enjoyed this film the first time I saw it, I wasn’t blown away. Mostly that’s because the film is small, and I feel that children entering those unpleasant teenage years should be hidden in a closet until they have a coming out party at the age of 21. But when I saw Moonrise Kingdom a second time, I was able to see the incredible craftsmanship in this script. This is a transcendent romantic comedy, which is tough enough to pull off (and now two in one year!). But the writers also add in terrific work on story world, namely the kind of Americana utopia found in such classics as Meet Me in St. Louis, You Can’t Take It with You and Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story. Moonrise Kingdom opens in the mini-utopia known as the “buzzing household.” But the flip is that this is an apparent utopia, because the wife is having an affair and the teenage daughter, the pretty princess I like to call “Perfume Girl,” is miserable. We then jump to another mini-utopia, the perfectly organized, perfectly geometrical scout camp, home of “Nerd Scout.” But this too is an apparent utopia, because Nerd Scout is an outsider and wants to run away with Perfume Girl. With an approaching storm giving us a vortex (the same technique found in Argo), the writers twist every romantic comedy beat in a fresh and endearing way and converge on a literal cliffhanger. We end with a new home and scout utopia, and the memory of the perfect moment and the only true utopia in the story, when the boy and girl created their Moonrise Kingdom by the bay. If you don’t like your lead characters to be 12, this movie may not do much for you. But this script is sensational, and while it has no chance of winning in the Original category, it should. Flight Flight’s strength is that it’s an actor’s film, written with a big juicy starring role. A lead character that can attract a movie star is a big advantage in the Hollywood sweepstakes. But Flight’s strength is also its first great weakness. The lead character is so dominant that the film is essentially one long monologue where Denzel Washington gets to strut his stuff. Now Denzel struts very well, but that doesn’t make for a good story. When you wed the lead character’s dominance to a story about alcoholism, you end up with a predictable plot, a one-note character and a painfully obvious and false climax. You can probably tell I don’t think this script can or should win. Django Unchained Django Unchained is a genre mash up that is quite enjoyable for about 2/3 of its very long running time. Writer Quentin Tarantino combines the spaghetti Western with Comedy, and adds in his usual funny and sometimes bizarre dialogue. The scene where the Klansmen complain that they can’t see though the eyeholes is hilarious. But to see what’s really going on here, it’s important to look at Tarantino’s underlying story strategy in both this film and his previous film, Inglorious Basterds. Part of the reason Django became less enjoyable to me as it went on is that the fundamental sadism of the writer-director became overwhelming. Simply put, Tarantino seems to take extreme pleasure in finding creative new ways to maim, torture and kill people. As his career has progressed, Tarantino has found the need to justify this sadism. So for him the question naturally arises: how do I create a story world where this extreme level of violence is not only acceptable, it’s necessary? Answer: create stories where the heroes fight two of the worst crimes against humanity in history, the Nazis and slavery. It’s win-win-win: Tarantino gets free reign to torture and kill to his heart’s content, the audience gets to feel good about taking revenge against all those evil people, and critics get to applaud Tarantino for his masterful take on the “big themes.” Note to Quentin: please, please stop acting in your own movies. The moment you show up in this movie is the moment it officially ends. Zero Dark Thirty The hit against Zero Dark Thirty is not that the writer, Mark Boal, showed the CIA torturing victims. And if this script doesn’t win Best Original Screenplay, it won’t be because three U.S. Senators criticized it. It will be because the script’s not that good. I admit, I don’t get why critics love Boal’s scripts. I thought The Hurt Locker was one of the most over-rated films of that year, primarily because of the script. The writer is supposedly a fanatic about authenticity, but every person I know with military experience has said that film was so full of absurdities it was hard for them to watch it. In Zero, Boal has set a bigger task for himself, bringing down Osama Bin Laden. In reality, this was a ten-year project that involved hundreds if not thousands of people. And that creates a story nightmare for the writer. His solution: structure the story on the desire line of one woman. Notice this gives a potentially sprawling story real focus and narrative drive. But the costs are high. This decision limits plot to the somewhat predictable actions of one person. It completely removes the possibility of character change, and even the importance of character itself; our hero is a cold, determined woman whose only change, or sign of humanity, is that she sheds a tear of relief when the whole thing is over. Oh, and did I mention, making this a one-woman job is absurd. Whether you agree or disagree with my views and my choices, I hope this article gets you to look under the surface, to see the structural decisions these writers made in creating their scripts. Remember, it’s all about studying the pros so you can learn techniques that may result in one of your scripts being nominated for Best Screenplay.

Hit 2012 Movies Show Why It's All About Learning Genres

For years I’ve been making the case that the key to becoming a professional screenwriter is to follow the first rule of Hollywood: it buys and sells genres. If you don’t know what Hollywood is buying you have no chance of selling them your script.

Genres are different kinds of stories, like comedy, detective and fantasy. These stories have proven their appeal to worldwide audiences for decades, centuries and sometimes over thousands of years. Each genre has anywhere from 8-15 story beats (story events) that must be present in your story if the script is to have any chance of success.

It would be nice if all you had to do to write a sellable genre script is to learn the story beats of your form and execute them properly. Unfortunately that’s what every other writer is doing. You need to do more.

In the past I’ve emphasized the first strategy for writing a genre script that stands above the crowd, which is to transcend the genre. This means that you not only hit every beat of your form, you twist them in a unique way that no one’s ever seen before.

This year we’ve seen many more films that use the second key strategy for writing a unique genre script: mixing genres. Hollywood here is using the age-old marketing technique of “give ‘em two for the price of one.” Except that now it’s more like three or four for the price of one. Almost all of the hit films of the year are a mix of multiple genres. And they, like 99% of the films that come out of Hollywood year in and year out, choose from these 11 story forms: Action, Comedy, Crime, Detective, Fantasy, Horror, Love, Memoir-True Story, Myth, Science Fiction and Thriller.

The question is: how do you do it? It’s not as easy as it appears. When you combine genres you run the risk of story chaos, because each genre comes with a unique hero, desire, opponent, theme and story beats.

Let’s look at the biggest hits of the year and see which genres the writers combined and how. One strategy for mixing genres used by three of the year’s biggest blockbusters – Hunger Games, The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises – is to combine one or two genres with the Myth form. Myth is the most popular genre in the world, which is why it is the foundation for more hit films than any other form. Myth travels the world better than the other forms because it deals with big archetypal characters and life situations, so it transcends cultural boundaries. But Myth is almost always combined with other genres that both update and unify the often-episodic Myth.

Hunger Games combines Myth with Science Fiction. Book author and co-screenwriter, Suzanne Collins, understood the power of this combination right from the premise, which is based on the classic Greek myth, Theseus and the Minotaur. Every year King Aegeus must send seven young men and seven young women to be eaten by the Minotaur in ritual payment for a crime. Collins’ main character, Katniss, is based on one of the major Greek goddesses, Artemis (aka Diana), the huntress. The best beat of the story, when Katniss shoots an arrow through an apple in the mouth of a pig, is right out of the Swiss legend of William Tell.

Collins then uses Science Fiction to create a futuristic world that takes the capitalist foundation of American society to its logical extreme. In this world, competition for show and money has taken on life and death stakes. This mash-up of ancient past with possible future gives the audience the sense that this story isn’t specific to a particular time and place. It is universal; it is today.

The Avengers combines Myth with Action and elements of Fantasy. All superheroes are Myth characters (especially the Norse god Thor), and bringing them together to form a Dream Team is as old as both Greek and Norse mythology. But the structure of this story is taken from Action, in particular a sub-form of Action known as the Suicide Mission story. Suicide Mission, like its cousin, the Heist story in the Crime genre, shows us a collection of all-stars who reluctantly form a team to accomplish an almost impossible goal. Using some excellent techniques from TV Drama, writer Joss Whedon takes these mythical heroes through all the action beats, ending with the definitive beat in the Action story, the final bloody battle.

The first film in the Batman trilogy written by the Nolan brothers, Batman Begins, hits and twists every beat of the Myth genre perfectly. But the second film, The Dark Knight, with its showdown between Batman and The Joker, is really a Fantasy Crime story, with the original Myth elements sitting underneath. The Dark Knight is the greatest superhero film ever made, and that put tremendous pressure on the Nolans to top it with The Dark Knight Rises. Their approach? A Crime Epic, a story of worldwide injustice with story beats right out of the French Revolution. That was probably a bridge too far, because even terrific writers like the Nolans could not inflate the Crime beats to that level. But you have to love their ambition.

This is the time of year when the Oscar contenders show up. The hottest picture right now, with a major shot at actually winning Best Picture, is Argo. Argo uses the strategy of mixing genres that rarely go together, in this case True Story with Political Thriller and Action.

True Stories typically have a gritty reality but lack dramatic shape. Political Thrillers are extremely choreographed and intensely dramatic. But at least when done in film, they usually pit a single hero against a vast organized conspiracy. So they often end badly. Because of the unique facts of this true story, these virtually opposite genres fit perfectly together and each genre’s strength solves the other genre’s weakness.

But the usual beats of the True Story form did require writer Chris Terrio to make a big change in the traditional Thriller beats. In the classic Thriller, the opponent is hidden and plot comes from reveals. Not here. The Iranian security force is the clear opponent from the beginning. So Terrio had to pull from the Action genre to create his plot. He sets up a huge vortex, a crosscut between the hero trying to get the hostages out and the opponents closing in for the kill. Everything will converge at the airport, and the combination of Action and Thriller beats gives the film a knockout ending.

Mixing genres is a dynamite strategy if you want the best chance to write a script that Hollywood might actually buy. But it’s not easy. You have to be able to execute. And that means you have to learn the genre beats of every form you’re mixing, and learn them so well that you can make some major adjustments to handle the unique qualities of your particular story. Each genre is a complex story system. But the good news is you can learn them. You just have to willing to put in the effort and the time.

SKYFALL Story Quiz

There have been many reviews of the new Bond film, SKYFALL.  John thought it would be a fun exercise for you to think about what was effective (or not) in the script before he weighs in with his breakdown.  So, here is a Story Quiz on SKYFALL for you to apply Truby's story structure beats to "get under the hood" and see how it works.  We'd love to hear your answers to these questions on the Truby's Writers Studio Facebook page.  John will weigh in on those comments and post his full breakdown of the movie soon.
   
1. The hero and opponent are very clear, but what are they fighting over -- loyalty to country vs. personal gain, man vs. machine (technology), something else?    
   
2. The writers bring in Bond's ghost (childhood).  Was that effective in adding layers to his character, or did it feel like it was thrown in as window dressing? 
   
3. Did we see Bond grow as a character, go through self-revelations and learn something about himself? 
   
4. Did we see enough facets/complexity in the opponent (Bardem as Silva)?  
   
5. Like in any Bond film, the story stretches believability in many places.  Is this a problem with the writing, or something we should expect in one of these action films? 
   
6. What did you think of the dialogue?  Did it drive the plot, or just entertain? 

Argo

Argo is a terrific political thriller that will probably get some Oscar nominations. I hope that includes one for writer Chris Terrio whose ability to tell an epic true story using the thriller genre allows him to transcend both true story and thriller.

The political thriller is a popular sub-genre in novels, but much less so in film. That’s because the typical opposition in political thrillers – some form of government agency – is so big and so hidden that it’s not a fair fight. Which means political thrillers in film often end badly.

But that’s not the case in Argo. This film is based on real events whose outcome we know, or at least suspect, going in. Besides giving us an upbeat ending, these real events give the highly choreographed thriller beats a raw, gritty believability and tremendous emotional impact.

Still, the true story foundation creates some real problems for the writer. The biggest difficulty you face in writing a true story is that real events don’t tend to have dramatic shape. They often don’t build to a final decisive battle and they often have long stretches of time where no story beats occur.
Again, that’s not the case with Argo. The final battle is extremely dramatic and the short time period in which the key events unfold means there is no down time. But the true story foundation does require Terrio to structure his thriller in a much different way than normal.

In the typical thriller, the hero investigates an apparent opponent who may, or may not, be guilty of a crime. The opponent’s true power, and the final truth of that character’s guilt, is parceled out over the course of the story. Notice that plot in this form of thriller is based on revelations, and we save the biggest revelation for last.

In Argo, the opponent is not a suspicious, hidden character but rather a known, extremely powerful Iranian security force that will capture and possibly kill the heroes. So plot will not come from a succession of reveals. There is nothing about the enemy we don’t know from the very beginning.

Instead plot must come from the hero’s plan and, even more so, from a succession of building attacks against the hostges. So the writer sets up a huge vortex, a crosscut between the hero trying to get the hostages out and the opponents closing in for the kill.

Terrio creates the vortex by beginning with the endpoint in space and time, the airport, where heroes and opponents finally decide the issue. He then works backward to the beginning of the two prongs: the hero creating his plan and the opponents trying to find who is missing.

One of the key techniques for setting up the vortex properly has to do with the desire line of the story. The desire line in thrillers is especially tricky because it always involves some version of investigating while under attack. Notice there is a push-pull effect on the desire line that is difficult for the writer to calibrate. When the hero is investigating he is active and moving forward. But over the course of the story the hero comes under increasingly aggressive assault by the opposition, which makes him reactive and knocks him back.

In Argo, Terrio replaces the investigation line of most thrillers with an even clearer goal: get the captives out. The opponents have an equally clear goal: keep the captives in. The endpoint of both those goals is the same place, the airport. So now the vortex story structure is simply a matter of speeding up the crosscut as the heroes and opponents approach the convergent point.

This crosscutting vortex structure goes to the heart of the film medium itself. It’s as fundamental as the crosscut between the cowboy racing to save the damsel tied to the tracks and the oncoming train that’s going to run her over. In this simplest form of crosscut, the point is to set up the pressure cooker effect. The faster you crosscut as you approach the end, the greater the pressure builds on the audience. If the hero wins, the result is total elation.

The writer adds a number of other story and dialogue techniques that make this script really sing, especially some very funny inside Hollywood jokes as the hero is concocting his plan. I saw the film at the Writer’s Guild theater and one joke in particular about directors had the audience in stitches. In a story this intense, comedy plays the same role as the fake attack does in horror. It releases the pressure on the audience only to allow the writer to kick the pressure up to an even higher level.

But the key to the success of this script and film is the writer’s ability to infuse an already dramatic true story with powerful thriller beats. Thriller tends to be a very narrow form. In the Detective, Crime Story and Thriller Class I talk about transcending the form by combining it with its genre opposite, the epic. By accomplishing this difficult feat, Chris Terrio has written one of the best films of the year.

Breaking Bad

I had no interest in watching Breaking Bad when it first began its run. Yet another story about the drug trade sounded boring and unpleasant to me. But after AMC ran a Breaking Bad marathon this summer, I finally gave it a shot. I found I’d been missing one of the best dramas in the history of television.

To understand why a TV show or movie works, you have to start by identifying the story challenges the author faced at the beginning of the writing process. First, show creator Vince Gilligan had to overcome the same audience expectation I had, which is that this was going to be another boring, predictable story about druggies. A second challenge was one all TV writers must solve: extendability. Instead of a two-hour movie plot, Gilligan would have to come up with a huge number of plot beats, over multiple seasons, derived from the business of selling drugs.

This challenge would become even harder when Gilligan decided to use an average guy to drive the story. This wasn’t going to be Miami Vice on the border of Mexico. So what’s the story?

Gilligan’s grand solution to these challenges came when he realized how to do a crime story that uses the unique power of TV. The crime genre, unlike the detective form, is often told from the POV of the criminal. Gilligan’s great insight was that, with TV, he now had an entire season to show what it means and feels like to be a criminal.

American television, like Hollywood film, puts tremendous emphasis on a high concept premise to set the story apart from everything else on the market. Gilligan has said, “What was interesting to me was a straight arrow character (Walt) who decides to make a radical change in his life and goes from being a protagonist to an antagonist.” His initial pitch to Sony was, “I want to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface over the life of the series.”

That’s a brilliant premise, and one that included in its single line how this story idea could support a long-running series. Notice Breaking Bad is the mirror opposite of The Sopranos. The Sopranos is about a mob king who kills by day but sees a psychiatrist and has trouble with his family at night. Breaking Bad is a high school teacher by day who becomes a drug lord at night. Both play with the contrast of sensational crime vs. the common everyday to generate a skewed but fascinating reality.

The choice of which genre to use for your story idea is just as important in TV as it is in film. The Detective story is by far the most popular genre in TV, not just in America but worldwide. Crime, with a few notable exceptions, is not nearly so hot. But notice how the Crime form in TV allows writers to do things they could not do with Detective. Because Crime is from the point of view of the criminal, we feel what it’s like for this average man to see and do progressively more terrible things, to watch while a man is beaten to death, to face certain death at the hands of a drug boss, even to kill a man in cold blood. As they say on the show: “The cost of doing business.”

And with TV Crime you can show how becoming a criminal affects that person’s most intimate relationships. Over the course of Breaking Bad we see in minutely calibrated detail how Walt’s lies and criminal actions drive his wife away and destroy the family he is trying to save.

In all of my genre classes I talk about the importance of not simply hitting the basic story beats of your form, but of transcending them, so that the story is original. This is just as essential for success in TV as it is in film. And this is one of the key strategies Gilligan uses on his show.

All transcendent Crime stories deal with moral accounting over a lifetime. The focus is not on a single crime, but rather on how the criminal’s actions tally up on a lifetime board where some final settlement must be made. Transcendent crime storylines detail the playing out of karma. (For all the story beats of Crime, as well as how to transcend the form, take a look at the Detective, Crime and Thriller Class.)

The premier movie artists of transcendent Crime are the Coen brothers, in films like Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, No Country for Old Men and True Grit. What’s unique about Gilligan is his ability to adapt transcendent crime to the TV medium, by having the crime come out of the hero’s sickness and buried hubris, and by showing that the nastiest war of the show is within the family.

Like the Coen brothers, Gilligan also plays with the black comedy elements that so often come with transcendent Crime. This was especially true in the early episodes of the first season when Walt and his partner, Jesse, are comically incompetent at this new business of crime. But we also saw it in the opening episode of season 5, essentially a comedy caper where the guys rig up some high-powered batteries to knock out an incriminating computer in the police station.

Of course the linchpin in Gilligan’s story strategy is his extremely complex and contradictory hero, Walt. Walt begins as a brilliant but nebbishy normal guy, a character grounded in a reality that every viewer recognizes. He is an everyman, pushed around his whole life and trapped in a job that is beneath his talents. Then he learns he has cancer. This bombshell makes him take stock and take control of his life.

For a transcendent Crime show, this is a brilliant stroke. Notice that by starting Walt as a normal and moral person, Gilligan prevents the viewer from mentally shoving the hero into the crime or gangster ghetto. Crime isn’t something those “other” people do. Crime is the crucible where everyman Walt must face a series of moral tests. And the decisions he makes, the methods he uses, lead him down a path to hell.

It’s a path filled with contradictions. Walt starts to become hooked on the intellectual game of it all. On the plus side, he starts to become assertive, his own man, even as he faces death by cancer or by murder. But then Walt comes to feel that he is an artist, a master chef. The hubris that was buried deep inside him long ago starts to bubble to the surface, until finally in season 5, Walt is a full-blown Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

As so often happens with a well-drawn character, the seed for Walt’s flowering as a complex and contradictory character lies in his ghost, the event from the past still haunting him in the present. In the first few episodes of season 1, Walt hints at the fact that he was screwed out of a wildly successful chemical business. Now he teaches chemistry to high school students. But deep down he believes he is a genius and deserves to be a rich businessman, too. When all the original rational reasons for making and selling drugs are long gone, it is this pride and resentment that will guarantee Walt’s eventual death.

The single biggest challenge for any show runner and writing staff is how to sequence the episodes. In other words, how do you segment and sequence the plot over an entire season? By watching all the episodes of this show in such a short period of time, I had a clear window into how exceptional the story build is in Breaking Bad.

Again, much of the credit for this has to go to Gilligan’s original conception and structure of the show. By starting Walt as a moral everyman, Gilligan is able to sequence the plot based on the hero’s moral challenges. Each episode tracks both an escalation of trouble for Walt and a moral decision that is more complicated than the one that came before.

This escalating moral sequence is hung on the premise line of the show: from Mr. Chips to Scarface, from protagonist to antagonist. Notice this gives a natural endpoint for the series. As Walt goes to greater extremes to reach his obsession, his rationales become emptier, and he finally runs out of options. As Gilligan says, “Breaking Bad is not engineered to last indefinitely. It is engineered to end at a certain time and place. Having said that, I’m not entirely sure what that time and place is.”

This focus has been a tremendous benefit to the show, allowing it to build not just within each season but from first season to last. But the cost is starting to be felt. Breaking Bad has shown us the making of a master criminal, but now that he's here, he’s not as much fun to watch. It’s not just that he’s become extremely unlikable, especially to his wife, Skylar. He’s not as compelling. With so much hubris, it’s obvious what is going to happen to him. So the plot has suffered as the final season moves toward its inexorable end. The only question for me is: who will kill him. My bet was on Jesse. But as Walt has become more monstrous to his wife, I now believe that Skylar will have the opportunity to prevent his death, but won’t.

If you’re interested in writing for television, you must study this show. In my TV Drama Class, I go into great detail about all the elements that go into a great TV script, from tight structural weave to lean, powerful dialogue. You’ll find those same elements in any episode of Breaking Bad.

If you’re a screenwriter or novelist, study this show for mastery of story. Because no matter what medium you work in, it’s all about being the best storyteller you can be.